The Russia story continues to unfold and as it does, Trump is lashing out in an attempt to direct attention away from his problem. According to Trump everything is fake news. Take it from someone who does it best.

summary - People who suffer long-term stress may also be more prone to obesity, according to research that involved examining hair samples for levels of cortisol, a hormone which regulates the body's response to stress.

The foreign minister, who is a close aide to Peña Nieto, declared that Mexico would defend its people living in the United States and go to the United Nations if necessary. He also rejected any suggestions that non-Mexican deportees would be deported to Mexico, dismissing the US proposals as “unilateral”.

With Mr. Trump’s decision this week to rescind protections for transgender students that allowed them to use bathrooms corresponding with their gender identity, the next stop is the Supreme Court, where Mr. Grimm — an engaging yet slightly awkward young man — is the lead plaintiff in a case that could settle the contentious “bathroom debate.”

Now, spurred by explosive protests and a torrent of angry phone calls and emails from constituents — and outraged themselves by Mr. Trump’s swift moves to enact a hard-line agenda — Democrats have all but cast aside any notion of conciliation with the White House. Instead, they are mimicking the Republican approach of the last eight years — the “party of no” — and wagering that brash obstruction will pay similar dividends.

Good morning. It is cloudy and 50 degrees here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts a cloudy day with temperatures around 70 degrees this afternoon. By the end of today there will be very little snow left from our massive storms of just two weeks ago. Back to square one we go.

At 9:15 a.m. ET the DOW is -94 and the price of oil per barrel is down. The market is poised to open significantly lower.

The market's record run over the past 10 days may be in trouble today, although as I write, the day is still young and things can always change. It's still about fourth quarter corporate reports with the focus being on retailers. Notice that it is the weight of Democrats fearing for our lives under the Trump administration that is dragging on consumer sentiment.

A final reading of the Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index for February will be published at 10 a.m. ET. A preliminary reading for February showed sentiment dropped, pulled down by Democratic supporters who are worried about the future.

An undocumented Salvadoran immigrant known only as Sara was involuntarily taken to Prairieland Detention Center despite suffering from a brain tumor, according to a report by The Hill. At the time she was apprehended Sara was a patient at Huguley Hospital in Fort Worth, Texas, and receiving treatment for her ailment.

It was one of many overflowing town halls this week, as constituents angry that members of Congress haven’t pushed back against President Trump have organized across the US to exert direct pressure, and have besieged the typically sedate constituent meetings with protest signs and shouts.

Any life that gained a foothold and the capacity to look up would have a remarkable view from a Trappist-1 world. From the fifth planet, considered the most habitable, the salmon-pink star would loom 10 times larger than the sun in our sky. The other planets would soar overhead as their orbits required, appearing up to twice the size of the moon as seen from Earth. “It would be a beautiful show,” said Amaury Triaud at the Institute of Astronomy at Cambridge University

“I don’t want to go to the store, to church — they are looking everywhere, and they know where to find us,” said Meli, who asked that her last name not be used out of fear of getting caught. “They could be waiting for us anywhere. Any corner, any block.”

Individual schools will remain free to let transgender students use the bathrooms with which they are most comfortable. And the effect of the administration’s decision will not be immediate because a federal court had already issued a nationwide injunction barring enforcement of the Obama order.

Good morning. It is mostly sunny and 48 degrees here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts clouds later and temperatures in the high 60s this afternoon. We'll have temperatures in the 60s for the next three days and the snow is really retreating quickly from our wham bam multiple snow storm havoc of less than two weeks ago. If I didn't know better I would say it's an extremely early Spring. There is still some time for Winter to play out a bit more but plants are probably a little freaked out right about now.

At 9:15 a.m. ET the DOW is +41 and the price of oil per barrel is up. The market is poised to open moderately higher.

The indexes continue to rise. If corporate earnings are good then the indexes rise - corporate reports are coming in strong. And that is the bottom line name of the game.

summary - Almost 20 per cent of the food made available to consumers is lost through over-eating or waste, a study suggests. The world population consumes around 10 per cent more food than it needs, while almost nine per cent is thrown away or left to spoil, researchers say.

Elected Republican officials, in Trump’s mind, should focus on representing “Republican people.” Others may speak up and petition the government for redress of grievances, but as far as Trump is concerned, their voices are neither important nor relevant.

Thursday9.30am Fake Climate News Camouflaging an Anti-Capitalist Agenda – And What President Trump Plans To Do About ItTalk sponsored by the charming folks at Energy and Environment Legal Institute, an organisation that litigiously pursues climate scientists.

Consider the irony - you call corporation x about some issue and you speak with a representative based in Mexico, someone who was recently deported from the USA. Talk about an opportunity to exercise some type of revenge...

The booming industry needs English speakers to service US customers, and the US president seems set to oblige with a deportation force that could banish record numbers of Americanized Mexicans south of the border.

When every local law enforcement encounter can be a prelude to deportation, unauthorized immigrants will fear and avoid the police. And when state and local officers untrained in immigration law suddenly get to decide who stays and who goes, the risk of injustice is profound.

Good morning. It is currently cloudy and 43 degrees here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts a cloudy day with temperatures in the high 50s this afternoon. The forecast also predicts a series of days in the 60s starting tomorrow along with a boatload of rain. It's nice having the light return, counting the half hour or so of light we get after sunset and before sunrise, we get just about 12 hours of light right now and the light is increasing each day. I'm up at 5:30 a.m. so I see it getting light out up around 6:15 now.

At 9:20 a.m. ET the DOW is +93 and the price of oil per barrel is down. The market is poised to open significantly higher.

Investors are eager to push the indexes up and we are still in the midst of quite a market spurt.

It's interesting, the story of Jesus surrounds the movement of a supreme spiritual leader whose simplicity of lifestyle, humility, morality, and nobility of spirit eventually earns him the banishment of the state and torturous execution. Of course Jesus is not forgotten but is fundamental to Christianity, his namesake. Then along comes Trump whose lifestyle represents an utter disdain for humility, morality, nobility of spirit etc etc etc, and he is made the supreme leader while simultaneously seeking to strengthen and deepen his power at the expense of democracy, and yet he is supported by the Christians. Milo is more or less a barnacle on the underbelly of the Trump Titanic.

...despite the White House’s denials, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak have both said, on the record, that Vladimir Putin’s government was in communications with the Trump campaign before Election Day in the U.S.

summary - A brain-to-computer hookup can enable people with paralysis to type via direct brain control at the highest speeds and accuracy levels reported to date, a clinical research publication has demonstrated.

Plame said she sees the country heading into a dangerously unstable period that just might result in disaster involving her No. 1 concern of the past several years:Nuclear bombs.Blame it on President Trump, his reckless ways, and the “low-quality people he surrounds himself with,” she said.

The uniformity of this style suggests a political statement which, indeed, it is. Theirs is a look that defiantly embraces the most conservative notions of femininity and firmly rejects any idea of modernity, let alone feminism. The idea of dressing for themselves – to have fun, to experiment with different styles – is as anathema to them as questioning the political, social and moral beliefs they have absorbed since they were 14 years old.

The US president was compared to a “petulant child” and had his intelligence questioned by MPs during a three-hour debate triggered after more than 1.8 million people signed a petition urging Theresa May to cancel her invitation.

Good morning. It is cloudy and 28 degrees here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts a partly cloudy day with temperatures in the high 40s this afternoon. Looking ahead the longer range forecast is predicting temperatures in the 60s Thursday, Friday, and Saturday with Thursday even approaching 70 degrees. That pretty much is going to mess with nature in all kinds of ways considering we are technically still in the middle of Winter. The snow continues to retreat, even the high piles at the end of parking lots are shrinking.

At 9:15 a.m. ET DOW futures are +66 and the price of oil per barrel is up now closing in on $55 per barrel, the highest it's been in roughly over 2 years. The market is poised to open moderately higher.

The market continues to forge ahead into new positive territory. Oil is more costly and so expect higher gas prices, they will creep up and up. Today it's also about fourth quarter corporate results from major retailers. Party on.

“If he hadn’t gotten into office, 70,000 miners would have been put out of work,” Patricia Nana, a 42-year-old naturalized citizen from Cameroon. “I saw the ceremony where he signed that bill, giving them their jobs back, and he had miners with their hard hats and everything — you could see how happy they were.”The regulation actually would have cost relatively few mining jobs and would have created nearly as many new jobs on the regulatory side, according to a government report — an example of the frequent distance between Trump’s rhetoric, which many of his supporters wholeheartedly believe, and verifiable facts.

summary - The ability of small intestine cells to absorb nutrients and act as a barrier to pathogens is 'significantly decreased' after chronic exposure to nanoparticles of titanium dioxide, a common food additive found in everything from chewing gum to bread, according to new research.

Take a moment to appreciate how bonkers this is. The sitting president believes major news outlets pretend to have sources in order to publish made-up stories. That’s obviously absurd, but it’s also an unnerving example of projection: Trump, whose rise to political notoriety was based in large part on racist conspiracy theories, has a habit of making up sources and conversations in order to make one false claim after another.

Northern California is in the midst of its wettest rainy season on record – twice as wet as the 20th century average, and 35% wetter than the previous record year. It proved to be almost too much for America’s tallest dam to handle. Water managers were forced to use Oroville Dam’s emergency spillway for the first time ever, which then began to erode, posing the threat of a failure and catastrophic flooding of nearby towns.

Stone began by discussing how Trump courted a plethora of new rightwing websites such as Breitbart and Infowars during the election campaign as a way of bypassing mainstream media and reaching out to a previously untapped audience of disgruntled white working-class voters. “This is the election in which the tipping point was reached,” he said. “The pendulum swung away from the mainstream media, which lost their hammer-lock monopoly on the dissemination of political information.”

Mr. Sater, 50, a Russian-American, pleaded guilty to a role in a stock manipulation scheme decades ago that involved the Mafia. Mr. Artemenko spent two and a half years in jail in Kiev in the early 2000s on embezzlement charges, later dropped, which he said had been politically motivated.

Good morning it is sunny and 37 degrees here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts a sunny day with temperatures in the low 40s this afternoon. It is brilliant outside, the birds are chirping up a storm and it's still February. The longer range forecast has it going up into the 60s by Thursday and continuing like that. This is quite out of the ordinary. We are told by the climate scientists that the Northeast will experience global warming stronger than most regions of the world. There will come a time relatively soon apparently when we will no longer have any snow through the Winter.

The question being asked this morning is, can the Trump rally continue? First off, Trump has very little to do with the economy at this point. Give it a few months, even a year, then he can own it. Second, no, it will not continue at least not indefinitely. Since when does the market continuously rise, it does not. Eventually we hit the wall, that's how it works.

Scientists have known for decades that drastically restricting certain nutrients without causing malnutrition prolongs health and lifespan in a wide range of species, but the molecular mechanisms underlying this effect have remained a mystery. Now new research sheds light on an important genetic pathway underlying this effect, raising the possibility that therapies can be developed to prolong healthy human lifespan.

Trump supporters see things very differently.They think the president is off to a fine start, with understandable hiccups given the extent to which he and his people are honest-to-God government outsiders. They echo White House strategist Steve Bannon’s labeling of the media as “the opposition party” and blame the press for trying to tear Trump down. They see the protesters as petulant malcontents and repeat Trump’s accusation that some of them are surely getting paid to demonstrate.

So the nation doesn’t need a shrink to help it to decide whether President Trump is fit to serve, mentally or otherwise. Presidents should be judged on the merits of their actions, statements and, I suppose, their tweets. No experts are needed for that — just common sense.

Good morning. It is 25 degrees and mostly sunny here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts a sunny-ish day with temperatures around 36 degrees this afternoon. The long range forecast predicts a warming trend with temperatures in the 40s and 50s over the next week. That, is pretty warm for this neck of the woods in February. Well the dust is settling after that utterly bizarre press conference from Dear Leader. The world's most brilliant, endowed, fundamentally perfect human being, a man who transcends humility and manners, and let's not forget that he's a billionaire and won the election with the greatest electoral vote total since George Washington, put America in it's place, but good. We underprivileged, light weights need to bow down to Dear Leader, a man whose every word acts like a saber cutting through the dimention-less drivel of a vast lying hateful conspiracy, promulgating deception, poverty, and corporate regulations through this great land. All hail Dear Leader.

At 9:20 a.m. ET DOW futures are -62 and the price of oil per barrel is down. The market is poised to open moderately lower.

The head of Samsung is now being carted off to jail for a list of corruption charges a mile long. Do I have to throw my Samsung phone away? Looks like the market is taking a pause, a step back as it were, as investors reassess.

4. Trump dismisses GOP town hall protesters because most of them are Democrats...most of those people weren’t the people who voted for Republicans in the first place, and thus shouldn’t be taken into consideration.”They are not the Republican people that our representatives represent,” the president said of the protesters.

Isn’t it rash to declare him unfit after so little time?The answer is no, because the Trump we are seeing now is fully consistent with the vindictive, self-involved and scattered man we saw during the 17 months of his campaign. In one of the primary debates, Jeb Bush said of Trump: “He’s a chaos candidate and he’d be a chaos president.” Rarely has a politician been so prophetic.

summary - By hijacking a cancer cell's own metabolism, researchers have found a way to tag and target elusive cancers with small-molecule sugars. This opens treatment pathways for cancers that are not responsive to conventional targeted antibodies, such as triple-negative breast cancer.

“Michael Flynn, General Flynn is a wonderful man. I think he’s been treated very, very unfairly by the media – as I call it, the fake media, in many cases. And I think it’s really a sad thing that he was treated so badly..."

But while Trump and his intimates were immune to the anti-Puzder campaign, other Republicans were not. At least four Republican senators – Susan Collins (Maine), Johnny Isakson (Georgia), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska) and Tim Scott (South Carolina) – looked set to vote against him, ending his chances of nomination. Rumor had it more knives were ready to be plunged in Puzder’s back.

One in five homeless Americans live in California, where the problem is especially acute. In the Golden State and three other western states – Hawaii, Nevada and Oregon – more than 50% of homeless people are categorized as unsheltered, meaning they are living in the streets, vehicles or parks, in places not fit for humans to stay. In New York, by comparison, the number is less than 5%.

“I love WikiLeaks!”“It’s a criminal action, criminal act,” Mr. Trump fumed at the White House. In a Twitter message, he asserted that “the real scandal here is that classified information is illegally given out by ‘intelligence’ like candy. Very un-American!”

Good morning. It is cloudy and 27 degrees here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts maybe a hint of sun, maybe a littel precipitation, and temperatures around 32 degrees this afternoon. Let's see what kind of superior policy our incredibly talented, patient, warm, wise, kind, thoughtful, and well spoken president has in store for humanity today. Hey, I can dream too, this dud's the opposite of all that.

At 9:15 a.m. ET the DOW is -25 and the price of oil per barrel is up. The market is poised to open moderately lower.

It appears to be a morning of 'pause'. Stocks have continued along on a bullish path. All kinds of new highs and records are going off this week. However this morning, there's a pause in the action.

Restaurants and other businesses across the U.S. will be closing their doors Thursday in support of a "Day Without Immigrants," a national grassroots movement seeking to protest President Trump's immigration reforms.The protests could hit the restaurant industry especially hard. Foreign-born workers provide the vast majority of labor in the sector.

...at least one Western European ally intercepted a series of communications before the inauguration between advisers associated with President Donald Trump and Russian government officials, according to people with direct knowledge of the situation.

Manafort, who has not been charged with any crimes, dismissed the accounts. “This is absurd,” he told The Times. “I have no idea what this is referring to. I have never knowingly spoken to Russian intelligence officers, and I have never been involved with anything to do with the Russian government or the Putin administration or any other issues under investigation today.” He added, “It’s not like these people wear badges that say, ‘I’m a Russian intelligence officer.’”

summary - New research could help explain why brief bodily stresses -- going to the sauna or for a run, for example -- are good for health and longevity. A study shows that the same cellular process, called autophagy, that's key for extending lifespan is also critical to the benefits of temporary stress.

The Russian influence scandal engulfing the White House deepened dramatically on Tuesday night with reports that some of Donald Trump’s campaign aides had frequent contact with Russian intelligence officials over the course of last year.

Good morning. It is cloudy and 34 degrees here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts a cloudy day with temperatures around 37 degrees this afternoon. Looking ahead the longer range forecast is predicting temperatures around 50 degrees on Sunday. If that happens it's going to be pretty wet around here with all the melting snow we now have. Well, well, well, what happens next? It looks like America is starting to catch on to the fact, and the emphasis is on the word fact, that our new president and all of his cronies are in complete cahoots with the Russians of all people. This turd pile is beginning to collapse piece by stinking piece. Each moment is bringing revelations of corruption and lying that make Watergate look like a stroll in the park. Now, will the GOP Senate do its actual duty and uphold the laws of the land or will they bow their hypocritical little slimy selves and look the other way and lie to America.

At 9:20 a.m. ET the DOW is +3 and the price of oil per barrel is down. The market is poised to open in the flat area.

More testimony from Janet Yellen today, and that is usually a very salient piece or most salient piece of the puzzle. It's all about that base interest rate and consequently how cheap the flow of money is. I certainly enjoy the credit bargains where you can buy something and have 36 months to pay it off with 0% interest. That's not going to stay. And when the political volatility of this administration's hubris slides around more and more, then what? Well, the hope is always the same, i.e. that wiser minds prevail, and that the decent institutions in this country hold up.

Watergate is the biggest political scandal of my lifetime, until maybe now. It was the closest we came to a debilitating Constitutional crisis, until maybe now. On a 10 scale of armageddon for our form of government, I would put Watergate at a 9. This Russia scandal is currently somewhere around a 5 or 6, in my opinion, but it is cascading in intensity seemingly by the hour. And we may look back and see, in the end, that it is at least as big as Watergate. It may become the measure by which all future scandals are judged. It has all the necessary ingredients, and that is chilling.When we look back at Watergate, we remember the end of the Nixon Presidency. It came with an avalanche, but for most of the time my fellow reporters and I were chasing down the story as it rumbled along with a low-grade intensity. We never were quite sure how much we would find out about what really happened. In the end, the truth emerged into the light, and President Nixon descended into infamy.This Russia story started out with an avalanche and where we go from here no one really knows. Each piece of news demands new questions. We are still less than a month into the Trump Presidency, and many are asking that question made famous by Tennessee Senator Howard Baker those many years ago: "What did the President know, and when did he know it?" New reporting suggests that Mr. Trump knew for weeks. We can all remember the General Michael Flynn's speech from the Republican National Convention - "Lock her up!" in regards to Hillary Clinton. If Hillary Clinton had done one tenth of what Mr. Flynn had done, she likely would be in jail. And it isn't just Mr. Flynn, how far does this go?The White House has no credibility on this issue. Their spigot of lies - can't we finally all agree to call them lies - long ago lost them any semblance of credibility. I would also extend that to the Republican Congress, who has excused away the Trump Administration's assertions for far too long.We need an independent investigation. Damn the lies, full throttle forward on the truth. If a scriptwriter had approached Hollywood with what we are witnessing, he or she would probably have been told it was way too far-fetched for even a summer blockbuster. But this is not fiction. It is real and it is serious. Deadly serious. We deserve answers and those who are complicit in this scandal need to feel the full force of justice.

“These are political activists who use humour as terrorism to mortify your opponent. We need that again, and with Trump we’ll probably get it. He’d be an easy person to do it to because he has a short fuse.”

At 4.15pm on Monday afternoon, Kellyanne Conway, counselor to Donald Trump declared that national security adviser Mike Flynn had the full confidence of the president. Seven hours later, Flynn resigned.

These days, the flow of unauthorized migrants is down to a trickle: Border Patrol apprehensions in the Southwest are at their lowest levels since the early 1970s. But that’s just one more fact for our addled, angry president to ignore.

In addition, the Army has been investigating whether Mr. Flynn received money from the Russian government during a trip he took to Moscow in 2015, according to two defense officials. Such a payment might violate the Emoluments Clause of the Constitution, which prohibits former military officers from receiving money from a foreign government without consent from Congress.

Good morning. It is mostly cloudy and 27 degrees here in the Upper Hudson Valley, the forecast predicts a mostly cloudy day with temperatures around 34 degrees this afternoon. The long range forecast at the moment shows snow again on Wednesday and temperatures in the 40s through the weekend. We see that Flynn has stepped down, the first casualty of the Trump administration. What a scumbag he is, and may he rot in hell for his part is sabotaging Clinton's presidential bid with his his underhanded miserable shit workings under the radar.

At 9:10 a.m. ET the DOW is -7 and the price of oil per barrel is up. The market is poised to open slightly lower.

The big take-away this morning is upcoming testimony by Fed Chair Janet Yellen before the Senate. The Fed has done its part in directing money policy as we continue to rebound from the Great Recession, and today we might hear more news about upcoming base interest rate hikes and a few predictions as well.

summary - Political discussions about immigrants often include the claim that there is a relationship between immigration patterns and increased crime. However, results of a new study find no links between the two. In fact, immigration actually appears to be linked to reductions in some types of crimes, according to the findings.

Last week, the new top lawman of the United States promised to forge an era of hardline “law and order” around the country, even as Americans across party lines support very different, less punitive approaches to questions of justice and young people, according to a new study.

The man has the personality of a distilled miserable authoritarian 19th century school master, whip included, dressed in a blue and red flag business suit. Does Trump ever inspire anyone with his kindness and light sense of humor? I wouldn't want to go either. It's like making jokes with Hitler.

Or consider the current G.O.P. panic over health care. Many in the party seem shocked to learn that repealing any major part of Obamacare will cause tens of millions to lose insurance. Anyone who studied the issue could have told them years ago how the pieces of health reform fit together, and why. In fact, many of us did, repeatedly. But competent analysis wasn’t wanted.

Good morning. It is 25 degrees, very windy, and cloudy here in the Upper Hudson Valley. The forecast predicts a windy and cloudy day with temperatures in the low 30s this afternoon. We got swamped with snow this weekend, we are up to our eyeballs in snow. Looking ahead, the temperatures are predicted to get more moderate and back into the 40s by the weekend. I hope you had a good restful weekend. Today Trump gets his Treasury Secretary and the country takes more looks at Flynn and wonders WTF?

At 9:20 a.m. ET the DOW is +49 and the price of oil per barrel is down. The market is poised to open moderately higher.

OPEC is releasing data on their alleged cut in oil production. Good numbers for investors, meaning they actually cut production, will send oil higher, or, not. The DOW continues to barrel on, raising the bar as the Trump rally continues, for now.

OPEC and other major producers agreed to slash oil production late last year and it looks like they're sticking to the plan. Last week, the International Energy Agency announced the cartel was 90% in compliance.

Trump’s unprecedented degree of out-and-out lying to the American people about things large (a conspiracy to cover up terrorist attacks) and small (crowd size) — especially stated in the presence of the intelligence community (as he did at CIA headquarters the day after his disappointing inauguration turnout) and the military — raises the legitimate concern that we cannot rely on the president’s words or assume his perceptions are accurate.

The list of evidence-free claims from President Trump and his administration is long and growing. “Millions” of people voted illegally. Inauguration turnout was the “biggest ever.” All negative polls are “fake news.”